Mountains Of The Moon

A long-cherished project for director Bob Rafelson, this fact-based adventure does not take as long to sit through as it took its central characters, 19th-century British adventurers Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke, to discover the source of the Nile. It only seems that way.

The Rafelson in the director's chair here is less the filmmaker justly famed for movies like FIVE EASY PIECES; THE KING OF MARVIN GARDENS; and BLACK WIDOW than he is the Rafelson who managed to make a dreary, snooze-inducing melodrama out of THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE, with Jessica Lange as the lust-crazed, greasy-spoon waitress driven to murder after thrashing in the flour with Ja...